Work Text:
June, 1931
Iain hadn't meant to fall in love. To begin with, he was abandoning Christopher, Helen, Sophy and Nattie and the others, and that wasn't fair. No one had asked him about it. So he'd crossed his arms and suffered himself to be dragged onto the boat by Auntie Mharie, who was trying gamely to convince him this was going to be ever such a grand adventure to share with his friends when they got back.
The thing was, Iain knew for a fact that they weren't coming back. That was just the subterfuge they were using to coax him onto the boat in the first place. He was never going to see his friends again, the world was ending, and these things being the case, he crossed his arms, turned his back on his family, and declined to speak to them. Of course, he had to make sure they noticed he was shunning them, which meant he had to turn around every couple of minutes to double-check they were watching him not watching them. It rather spoiled the effect. Da called it 'positively feline,' which Iain thought meant he was acting like Pilgrim, the Fox Corner cat, and it was all a very unfair comparison, because at least Pilgrim could have mauled their hands or swatted their ankles. Pilgrim had excellent, sharp claws, and was allowed to do that sort of thing. Whereas, had Iain tried a stunt like that, he'd have been in High Disgrace for weeks. That meant there was nothing for it but to turn resolutely back round, ignore the twinkle in Da's eyes, and count the blues of the sea.
That lasted until he became sick, which only proved that this whole, horrible plan was indeed a horrible, awful, ill-advised plan and they should have stayed home. Mam wouldn't have to worry about Pilgrim fending for himself, Iain would play with Christopher, Helen, Sophy and Nattie, and no one would have to speculate what sort of case the uncles had to solve over the summer, and everything would have been better.
They got to the Glasgow port, and Iain knew this was a terrible idea. It was noisier and busier than any city he had ever seen, and bore absolutely no resemblance to the much-mythologised place of Mam's stories. But then came the train, huffing and puffing and grumbling and snorting along the line, and that was almost interesting. There was another boat, but even Iain conceded grudgingly that it wasn't as awful as the first one. The blues surrounding it were even more legion than back at Halifax, and every time Iain blinked they multiplied. After that…well, it was miles and miles of nothing, wasn't it? They had taken him away from Christopher, Helen, Sophy and Nattie for the vast sprawl of nothing.
But then he smelled the coconut-sweet smell of the gorse, all golden and sun-ripe, and caught Mam's eyes in the sun, and they were nothing like anything Iain had ever seen, not even on the stage. The light shifted so that it seemed to slant and come through the gorse in its yellowy majesty, and Iain was enthralled. Da was whistling through his teeth, and Auntie Mharie took up the words, her voice bright and bird-like; Sure by Tummel, and loch Rannoch, and Lochaber I will go, Mam weaving in and out the top of the notes, Da, voice low and warm, rounding out the bottom. It was very hard to hold a grudge, Iain thought, in the face of beauty like the gorse, and music like a rainbow, and that was perhaps the most unfair thing of all. Especially because it was true, the words of the song. Kingsport might have the water, and Halifax it's harbour, but neither quite compared to the earthiness of the heather, the salt of the sea and the buttery sweet gorse all tangled together like this. In spite of himself Iain was seized by the wild impulse to go tearing down the road; he was stopped only by the recollection that he didn't want to be here.
'Has it changed so much?' said Auntie Mharie to Mam, and it seemed like a strange thing to say, until Iain remembered that this was new to her, too. He almost envied her being allowed to love it. Almost.
'Not at all,' said Mam.
'Not even a little,' Da said, lest there be doubt. Iain didn't see how there could be. The whole place had the feel of being elsewhere to it, like one of the places from Mam's plays. The endless forests and fantastical islands – little pockets of world where the rules got stopped and anything might happen. Then a lumpy shape came barrelling towards them, grey, beaming and bearing mundanity by the handful.
'You came back!' she said, absorbing Iain's parents into outflung arms.
'Always,' said Mam, having lost the last of whatever tether had linked linking her to English. 'We did say as we would.'
'And you brought the wee rattan, too,' said this lumpy, grey personage. She had eyes that crinkled like one of Rachel Carlisle's paper waterlilies, and a smile like a crooked stile. Before Iain could argue that he was neither wee, nor a rattan, but a strapping four-and-a-half, he was being hefted into broad sturdy arms.
'Let Granny Isobel have a look at you, then,' she said, and Iain, notwithstanding being All Grown Up, cast an anxious look at his parents for confirmation that he wasn't being abducted. They were smiling, so that had to be all right. In Iain's experience, parents generally took against having their children snatched. Uncle Geordie had said so back when the whole, horrible business of little Maggie Miller had been under investigation. Iain remembered that quite clearly because both his uncles had got awful twitchy about where they could play and how long for. Now the woman calling herself Granny Isobel was prattling away about having keys waiting and tea ready, and something to eat, and it dawned on Iain that he was hungry, and that if this was how faeries got you to eat the stuff that meant you could never escape back home, they were really terribly clever. Still, it seemed unlikely to be faeries, because really, Granny Isobel looked more ordinary than a very ordinary thing, all greys, tweeds and brisk practicality. Now, as they waded through the gorse with all its scratchy, prickly branches, she said over her shoulder to Auntie Mharie, 'You'll be the sister, I suppose.'
'Yes,' she said. 'Something like that. One good gesture and they're sort of stuck with me.' This got laughter from everyone but Iain, who couldn't understand the joke. Surely it was perfectly normal that she was stuck with them? She was theirs, after all. Mam and Da were always saying so. And anyway, it was only the way Larkrise had Teddy and Kitty. It wouldn't be Fox Corner without Auntie Mharie, or so Iain thought.
But then he was inside the cool of the stone house that Da said was also just the same as it had been, and Mam was arguing with Granny Isobel– she of the grey and the tweed – over who was going to make the tea, and Auntie Mharie was laughing at another joke that clearly wasn't a joke. Tea was what Mam did. Off-stage, anyway.
There were flowers everywhere. That was the first thing that struck Iain. Tucked behind the gingham curtains, in little jam-jar vases over the fireplace, on the table, the crevices of the counter; pinks, violets, bluebells, even the gorse like stalks of sunshine behind the picture frames. Heather overflowed the earthenware jug trying for a centrepiece at the kitchen table. Iain noticed this from between the table-legs as his parents and Granny Isobel swapped news and remember-whens. There were stories that made Iain squirm, as they recalled a time before him.
'You weren't even a star to be thought of,' said Granny Isobel. Then she swooped Iain up into her lap, kissed his curly brown head, and said, 'But I'm that glad someone got round to thinking of you,' and handed him a piece of warm, crumbly shortbread. Iain hesitated. Eat nothing, said some inner voice. You never get to leave if you eat it. But he was hungry, and it was perfectly crisp and crumbly between his fingers. Surely one bite was safe? Around him the adults were nodding. Iain risked it. It tasted of heaven.
Granny Isobel watched Iain eat it and said, gloatingly, 'I was starting to think no one would. Think of you, I mean.' That made Auntie Mharie squeal for a change, and occasioned more laughter.
Someone else, older, maybe, and quieter, came in and folded himself into one of the wooden chairs. He caught Iain's eye across the table and said, 'No one said you were so grown, Iain.' Iain puffed out his chest, delighted, and forgave the man his absence of shortbread pieces when he offered him a weathered smile and a leathery hand to shake.
This turned out to be Grandfather Hugh, a mouthful which Iain had shortly reworked into Grandew, to that man's considerable entertainment. He petted Iain's hair, and said he was a bonnie, braw lad, which Iain took from the manner of the saying, to be a compliment. He drafted Auntie Mharie into the nightly bridge four and himself out in the interest of teaching Iain, as he said, 'How to solve the clock.'
It's proper name, according to Grandew was Clock Patience, but somehow they never got into the habit of using it. They built card houses and were mutually exasperated at Dominoes in its various permutations. More than once they took Granny Isobel's food hostage, and the good Fairisle blanket, too, and hunkered down in the gorse to watch the birds circle. There were the usual ducks and gulls, and occasional plover, but once there was a pair of Red Kites that held them mesmerised until the rain came out of nowhere, and the midges with it, sending them running, hands over head, into the shelter of the cottage that was Iain's and family. Then there were the usual swifts, swallows and dicky birds, all yellow-stockinged and barefoot as they nosed through the grass. One afternoon he stuck a little round thing in Iain's hand, a beautifully heavy thing, with a dial and needle that Iain thought was a watch until Grandew showed him how it worked.
'So you can always find your way back, a leannan,' he said, and Iain forgave the childishness of the endearment, because the compass was heavy in his hand and terribly grown up.
'You'll spoil him,' said Granny Isobel, and she was always saying that. But then she'd produce a jumper exactly Iain's side, or slip him an extra-large portion of cranachan, and he had the strangest feeling she didn't mean it, not really. Neither did Mam, though she might cluck ever so much agreement. Her eyes were far too lighted up for that. And Iain had decided – oh, ages and ages ago – that you could tell a lot about a person from what they said with their eyes. Mam's eyes said they were home here, and faerie food had nothing to do with it.
Other days were slow and somnolent, so that Iain might be roused from a round of pick-up-sticks to Da's playful, I dream of Jeanie with the golden hair…
'Those aren't the words,' said Iain, perplexed.
'I like mine better,' Da said, and grinned at him. 'I consider them a definite improvement on the original.'
'Come on,' said Auntie Mharie, getting Iain by the hand, and tugged Iain towards the door and the great scraggly sprawl of the gorse. The blossoms were gone now, leaving behind only their leaves and the scratchy stalks.
'Where are we going?' asked Iain, half-running to keep pace.
'Somewhere,' said Auntie Mharie vaguely, 'to preserve your innocence.'
'What,' said Iain, with a calculated dive into the gorse, prickles and all, 'is inno-cents?'
That got him the kind of look he always seemed to get from adults when asking what seemed a perfectly reasonable question.
'It's the thing you don't miss until you wake up and realise it's vanished,' said Auntie Mharie, sounding more than half-serious. Iain considered this.
'Can you get it back?'
'You might, little rattan,' she said. Iain opened his mouth to argue that he was not a rattan, he was a gremlin, like every other one of the Kingsport children, but then the earth fell away and there was the wild cymbal-crash of the sea, so many white horses galloping in to shore.
'Come on,' said Auntie Mharie before he could formulate the thought, 'race the waves, why don't we? See if we win?'
Iain gave it a game effort. He hared off, shrieking with laughter, but the waves swallowed it. He laughed harder and ran faster over the slick, slippery scrag of the rocks, going now on all fours, now on his feet, occasionally letting Auntie Mharie pull him along in her wake. But it was no good; the waves outran them, Auntie Mharie's renowned skip-change notwithstanding. They collapsed, of necessity against the far wall of the beach, soaking with sea water, and gasping for breath. The air was painfully cold in Iain's lungs, and full of the salt taste of the sea, the bluster of the wind. The rocks with their crevices of springy, white heather made surprisingly good pillows, and he wanted to do nothing so much as snuggle into Auntie Mharie's side and fall asleep.
Perhaps he did; certainly it seemed a long time before he woke to the scream of a gull and his Aunt's tuneful humming, The stars are shining, cheerily, cheerily…Iain shielded his eyes with the back of his hand and squinted into the sun. Watched the gull circle lazily overhead. Watched as its fellows came and joined it, widening the flight path, wheeling and wailing in clumsy chorus. Auntie Mharie's fingers carded through his hair, dislodging heather sprigs. 'Bet the MacDairds have something nice on for your tea,' she said.
'Granny always does,' said Iain.
The tide had gone out in the hazy interval of Iain's sleep, and now the sand spread out below them, mottled with seaweed and stray pieces of driftwood. They eased themselves down off the rocks, and then walked, hand in crooked elbow, along the shore. They went slowly, sea-battered feet dragging, hunting sea glass and other rare commodities. Halfway back Iain bent over and scooped up a piece of patterened pottery like a prize. It was white with indeterminate blue designs painted on – or at least Iain thought it was painted. He tucked it into his pocket for safekeeping and leaned in to examine Auntie Mharie's offering of green seaglass. It wasn't like anything Iain had ever seen before, all smooth edges and milky surface. It felt almost soft between his fingers, and Auntie Mharie said it was from the waves beating against it. Iain thought of the foamy white horses racing inland and marvelled that anything so turbulent could produce something so unassuming.
Then there was the crawl back through the gorse, pausing to take stock of the inevitable half-dozen new scratches. That brought them into the garden, where the Fairisle blanket was spread out, the adults laying out the tea things. There was the Mull Pottery that Mam said had inspired the set they took home to Fox Corner, and the worn crockery of similar stamp. Someone, Granny Isobel, probably, had put a little earthenware jug centremost, crammed with wildflowers, and it leaned precariously to one side. It leaned more precariously when Iain scrambled onto the blanket and helped himself to a piece of melting tablet. The treasures of the day were duly passed round and exclaimed over.
'You're developing quite the collection,' said Grandew and Iain, mouth full of tablet, nodded enthusiastically.
The sun ducked behind a cloud, and the wind swooped out from underneath, rattling the pottery and nipping at Iain's fingers. He wrapped them around his very own pottery teacup and refused to acknowledge that he was cold, not even when Da leaned over with a knitted jumper and stuck him gently into it.
'Better?' he said, and Iain nodded again. He lay back, his head grazing the grass, and thought, as the sun debated a reappearance that he could stay here forever, temperamental sun, crying gulls, myriad breezes, midge-bites and all. He must have said it aloud, because Mam ran a hand through his hair and said, possibly rhetorically, 'And Christopher? Helen? Nattie? You'd not leave them.'
'Sophy, too,' said Iain, loyally. 'And, no. No, I'd not. I mean, I wouldn't.' He made a fist around the sea pottery, the better to ground him in the present. 'They could come here, too. They'd like it.'
Mam hummed in noncommittal fashion. She said, 'And the uncles? Would they like it? Auntie Faith?'
'We-ell,' said Iain, 'you never know. They might need doctors here. And p'licemen. And…'
He couldn't quite make himself mean it. The fact was that he couldn't see them here, among the yellow gorse and the bracken, the springy white heather. The miles and miles of nothing. Nesha – Nattie – might like it, true, but as for everyone else…Teddy, who hated to be cold, would have a thing or ten to say about the ever-shifting weather, as would Dachshund Tuesday. Never mind that poor Kitty would never have enough news to write about. It wasn't that sort of place. And…well, it was an awful long way from the Blake children. Also, there probably wasn't a Gilbert & Sullivan Society, whatever that was, and Uncle Geordie would certainly miss that. Uncle Jem, too. No, Iain couldn't see them here at all, however hard he tried, and somehow, that was the most unfair thing of all. Certainly more unfair than the boat he'd been stuck on in the first place.
'Ah, well,' said Granny Isobel, 'it was a lovely dream, a muirin. But you'll come back.'
'Always,' said Mam, a smile in her voice. 'We wouldn't have it any other way.'
Iain said it too, and meant it. We'll come back echoing like a prayer through his braw, bonnie personage. He thought of the needle on that lovely brass compass, going always to the North, and thought surely it understood the feeling. We'll come back. He thought it again on the boat, the bracken and the wild grasses falling away. Again, on the train, we'll come back, we'll come backin time to the chug of the engine and the whir of the wheels. He was still looking for his island as they boarded that last, awful boat. Da was humming; My heart's in the highlands, my heart is not here…Iain was too busy agreeing to join in. He leaned his little arms on the rail nearest his height, and wondered as he squinted out at the horizon, if it was still a grand adventure if it felt like the end of the world at the close. He was certain grand adventures were supposed to squeeze the heart less.
He thought of Christopher, Helen, Sophy and Nattie waiting on the other side, and that would be good. But he couldn't shake the feeling he was leaving a vital piece of himself somewhere among the tangle of the gorse, in that little stone house on Bara Isle. You definitely weren't supposed to leave pieces of yourself lying just anywhere; Iain knew that for a fact. Auntie was singing Farewell to the straths and green valleys below…Impossible not to think of the gorse hedge they had climbed through so often, the heather and bracken, the white frothy horses of the sea they had raced. The picnics of tablet and good bread and cheese. Fairie food after all, Iain thought. One bite would have been more than enough, as it turned out, to snare them – and they had feasted. So it was come back, or die miserably. Iain watched as the shore fell away one last time and pinned his stars to the saltire winking in the sunlight. They'd be back – soon and often. But for the time being there was only a myriad of blues and home beating ever closer.